2013 MBP13 to 2017 MBP13 (w/o TouchBar)

[laz232]

Have 2013 MBP 13" (8MB RAM). Considering 2017 MBP 13" without TouchBar due to 16MB RAM, despite the annoying lack of USB2 ports - I think that the extra RAM may help for my use case.

I've found somewhat conflicting reviews and was wondering if anyone can give actual real life experience, regarding:
Battery life?
CPU performance (is it any worse for single core)?

The heaviest workload is:
VMWare (Windows)
Lightroom

 

[0922251]

So far:

• Battery Life: Has been adequate. about 5-6 hours under heavy usage (Running Linux in Parallels Desktop) and about 7 - 8 hours doing lighter tasks such as YouTube (in Safari) and generic web browsing (Chrome). I have found that watching YouTube in Google Chrome kills the battery significantly faster than Safari
• CPU Performance: no complaints so far. Although my workloads aren't necessarily the greatest

And as a side note, you won't regret getting the 16GB RAM. I went with 8GB because I won't have this laptop for long but 16GB is definitely the way to go